The Happy Venture eBook

He hurried along, still wrapped in the atmosphere
which had surrounded him all day. He felt still
the lift of the boat over the short swell, he smelled
the pleasant combination of salt, and gasolene, and
the whiff of the hayfields, and his eyes still kept
the glare and the blue, and the swinging dark shape
of the Dutchman’s bows as he headed her
down the bay. Just before he reached Winterbottom
Road, he saw, rather vaguely through the twilight,
the figures of a man and a small boy, coming toward
him. They had, apparently, seen him, also, for
the man walked more quickly for a step or two, then
stopped altogether, and finally turned sharply off
the road and swung the child over a stone wall, with
a quick remark which Ken did not hear.

He did hear, however, the child’s reply, for
it was in a clear and well-known voice. It said:
“I don’t think this can be the way.
I didn’t come over a wall.”

The remainder of the cherry pie dropped to the dust
of the Winterbottom Road. Not more than three
gigantic leaps brought Ken to the spot; he vaulted
the wall with a clean and magnificent spring that would
have won him fame at school. The man was a stranger,
as Ken had thought—­an untidy and unshaven
stranger. He was not quite so tall as Ken, who
seized him by the arm.

“May I ask where you’re going?”
roared Ken, at which the small boy leaped rapturously,
fastened himself to Ken’s coat-tail, and cried:

“Oh, I’m so glad it’s you!
I started to come and meet you, and I walked farther
than I meant, and I got lost, and I met this person,
and he said he’d take me home, and—­”

“Shut up!” said Ken. “And let
go of me!" at which Kirk, thoroughly shocked,
dropped back as though he could not believe his ears.

“I was takin’ the kid home,” muttered
the man, “just like he says.”

“Why were you going in exactly the opposite
direction, then?” Ken demanded.

As he leaped abreast of the man, who was trying to
back away, the day’s receipts of the Sturgis
Water Line jingled loudly in his trousers pocket.
The stranger, whose first plan had been so rudely interfered
with, determined on the instant not to leave altogether
empty-handed, and planted a forcible and unexpected
blow on the side of Ken’s head. Ken staggered
and went down, and Kirk, who had been standing dangerously
near all this activity, went down on top of him.
It so happened that he sprawled exactly on top of
the trousers pocket aforesaid, and when the man sought,
with hasty and ungentle hands, to remove him from it,
Kirk launched a sudden and violent kick, in the hope
of its doing some execution.

Kirk’s boots were stout, and himself horrified
and indignant; his heel caught the stranger with full
force in the temple, and the man, too, was added to
the prostrate figures in the darkening field.
Two of them did not long remain prostrate. Ken
lurched, bewildered, to his feet, and seeing his foe
stretched by some miracle upon the ground, he bundled
Kirk over the wall and followed giddily. Stumbling
down the shadowy road, with Kirk’s hand in his,
he said: